MANILA – Sara Duterte walked into the 2022 Philippine election as Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s vice-presidential running mate and helped deliver him the largest electoral landslide Malacañang Palace had seen in two decades. On Monday, the Philippine Senate convened for the first time in history as an impeachment court against a sitting vice president. The accused was not there.
She sent her lawyers.
Senator Francis “Chiz” Escudero was elected as presiding officer over the objection of a minority bloc before opening proceedings with 21 senator-judges present. What those judges will ultimately decide carries stakes that extend well beyond this administration: a conviction would permanently disqualify Sara Duterte from holding any public office in the Philippines, ending the 2028 presidential bid she announced in February, when a survey still showed 51 percent of Filipinos willing to vote for her.
The four articles of impeachment are sweeping. The House prosecution charges her with misusing P612.5 million in confidential state funds, amassing unexplained wealth, accepting bribes while serving as secretary of education under Marcos, and making explicit assassination threats against the president, his wife Liza Araneta, and former House Speaker Martin Romualdez. The threats, delivered in a video statement, were never fully retracted.
“She betrayed the public trust by resorting to violence,” lead House prosecutor and Batangas Representative Gerville Luistro told the senator-judges in her opening statement Monday. The prosecution’s theory is that an official who has threatened to have a sitting head of state killed is unfit for any future office, not merely the one she currently holds.
Defense attorney Michael Poa offered the counter-argument before the chamber: “We, her lawyers, are here to prove the allegations against her have no basis.” Duterte’s own written statement, read into the record, framed her absence as constitutional prerogative rather than evasion, arguing that appearing through counsel “does not diminish accountability or imply a lack of transparency.” Marcos, characteristically elliptical, issued a statement through Malacañang that cut in the opposite direction. The accused can answer allegations directly, he said, and need not resort to “secondary channels, not through the lawyers.”
What nobody disputes is the arithmetic. Sixteen of the chamber’s 24 senators must vote to convict, a two-thirds supermajority in an institution where the Marcos coalition holds a commanding but not unbreakable majority. That count became more complicated hours before proceedings began when Senator Rodante Marcoleta, among the most vocal Duterte allies in the chamber, was arrested on a plunder charge and led away before he could take his place as senator-judge. The arrest removed one of the few reliable voices Duterte’s camp had counted on before the first witness was called.
The trial does not exist in isolation. It is the sharpest expression yet of the complete collapse of the Marcos-Duterte alliance, a partnership of political convenience that fused two of the country’s most powerful dynasties in 2022 but never reconciled their underlying conflicts. Marcos has repositioned the Philippines firmly within the American orbit on the South China Sea, a stance the Duterte family has publicly opposed. Rodrigo Duterte spent six years cultivating ties with Beijing and Moscow that his daughter continues to defend. The ICC arrest of Rodrigo Duterte’s former police chief Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, who surrendered to investigators in The Hague in May, severed the last pretense of shared political interest between the two families.
Marcos, meanwhile, has been assembling a diplomatic footprint that positions the Philippines as a regional partner of choice. A Canada-Philippines strategic partnership framework finalized last week and his confirmed attendance at the Russia-ASEAN summit in Kazan reflect multi-directional engagement that contrasts sharply with the Duterte-era alignment model. None of that forecloses a political interest in seeing his vice president permanently disqualified; it simply means the trial is proceeding while he is otherwise occupied building a foreign policy legacy.
The trial will run for 92 days under its pretrial schedule, with the Senate sitting as an impeachment court three times each week beginning at 2 p.m., NBC News reported. A verdict could arrive in late 2026, early enough to reshape the 2028 presidential field either way. Al Jazeera reported that more than 6,000 police officers were deployed around the Senate complex as pro- and anti-Duterte demonstrators gathered outside.
What no one can determine at the outset is how individual senators will eventually vote. The article charging assassination threats is viscerally legible to any voter; the confidential funds allegation is procedurally complex and depends on audit documentation that must survive cross-examination. The senators sitting in judgment have given no public indication of where they stand. Sara Duterte’s calculation, for now, is that she needs only nine of them to refuse conviction. Whether Monday’s absence was strategic discipline or a signal of something else about her defense, she has not said.
